We often hear that the best way to learn is to teach and that ‘if you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it well enough’ so involving students in teaching others through peer instruction has long been seen as having real benefits. Judith Good (Reader in Informatics) has taken this a stage further by working with the local community through Digital Education Brighton to set her students the task of working with young people at Blatchington Mill School, the Self Managed Learning College and Dorothy Stringer School to develop technology enhanced learning environments. Two of the students involved, Seb Long and Emma Foley, commented on what they gained from this activity.

As Seb explained, there were ‘layers and layers of teaching’ going on ‘what Judith has done with us, what we have done with the kids and what we have asked the kids to do with their teacher’. The students on the Technology-Enhanced Learning Environments course had to devise something that young people could use on a computer to help them learn programming or related skills. It was, as Emma said, ‘a very open brief’ for what was a ‘multi-faceted and complicated’ assignment, but Seb was clear that ‘the openness was part of the fun for us, being told: okay now go and solve a problem, do it however you like’. The involvement of the young people, their teacher, Genevieve Smith-Nunes and Dorothy Stringer School against the backdrop of the current ICT curriculum review meant that there were ‘so many different facets and streams running into this it has been quite hard to get control …but it all came together in a really imaginative and open-ended way that led us to come up with something that we think is really different and exciting’.

The proposed changes to ICT teaching in schools were part of what motivated Judith to set this assignment.

Read more at the RUSTLE blog post on students as teachers.